On the saving of bacon

Long story, the point will emerge.
My first novel, “Theft of the Master”, featuring Private Detective Al Hershey was not published until 5 years after completion. In the interim I had written (MSWord) an 80,000 word draft of a 2nd novel based on actual events in the Korean War; this was not a detective story and therefore did not feature Hershey. After publication of ‘Theft’ and a string of favourable reviews, the publisher urged me to write another Hershey story and that’s where I made my Huge Error. I decided to ‘convert’ the Korean story to include Hershey. Several months later I was about as stuck as it’s possible to get. My 80,000 words had been hacked about (e.g. changed to a Vietnam War background), was a total structural and chronological mess and going nowhere.
Then, deus ex machina, Scrivener. Suddenly - well, it took a few weeks even to reach modest proficiency - the structural problesm became, not easy unfortunately, but handleable. Three months on and the job is under control. I strongly suspect that without Scrivener I would have been reduced to starting over.
If ‘quality’ is defined as ‘fitness for purpose’ then Scrivener is the highest quality software I’ve ever used (and I’m Chairman of a software company and have been fiddling about with computers since the PDP8 - may mean something to Senior Users)
Thanks Keith. I owe you.
Ted Davison aka Edwin Alexander
theftofthemaster.com/

Thank you. :slight_smile: It’s always great to hear from authors who are using Scrivener to tame material and finding it helpful as an aide to their talents, so I’m glad Scrivener has been useful and good luck with the rest of it.
Thanks again and all the best,
Keith